


Coda

by igrockspock



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, Families of Choice, Family, Gen, Post-Episode: s05e18 Origin, Post-Episode: s05e22 Not Fade Away
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:55:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25796245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: Connor forges a relationship with Angel, one awkward conversation at a time.
Relationships: Angel (BtVS) & Connor (AtS)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 29
Collections: Fandom Giftbox 2020





	Coda

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cornerofmadness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cornerofmadness/gifts).



The first time Connor goes to Angel’s penthouse, he thinks about breaking in. Which is _wrong_. Wildly, wildly wrong, and also rude. His parents taught him better than that. But his feet twitch, itching to kick in the door.

His professor had said that only works in movies. In real life, you’re supposed to use your shoulder, so you can throw your whole body weight behind it. Somehow Connor knows that _he_ could do it with just a kick, and in some half-remembered life, he would have.

He takes an experimental step back, imagining how to line his foot up just right, and --

Angel opens the door.

Connor’s eyes go wide and he freezes on the spot, sure that Angel is like his mom, the kind of adult who can sense even the vague thought of wrongdoing. Connor waits for him to say something like, _What’re you doing out here, ya little shit?_ Because that’s definitely what Connor would say if he caught some punk eighteen-year-old thinking about kicking in his door.

But Angel doesn’t look mad. Gratitude lights up his face, then dissolves into worry before it vanishes finally into concerned professional blankness, like a high school counselor doing his job even though he’d rather be smoking pot.

“Connor,” Angel says. “Is everything alright? I mean, do you need --”

Connor clears his throat, shakes his head. “No. I. Yes. Everything’s okay, I mean.” There is no manual for talking to your vampire-dad, who doesn’t know if you know that he’s your real father. “I was just in the neighborhood,” he finishes lamely. “And I wanted to say thanks, for the help with the uh...demon ninjas who tried to kill my family? And the wizard in the urn?”

Angel shrugs it off, opens the door wider. “Do you want to come in?”

Connor nods and steps across the threshold. He knows he doesn’t need permission to come in, the way Angel would need permission to come into his house. Still, he can tell inviting someone in means something more to a vampire than it does to a human.

“Thanks,” he says, remembering his manners. The word makes the memory-dreams of Quor'toth slough off, and he feels like a normal boy again. A boy who was adopted and met his birth father, and it’s awkward, sure, but it’s a thing that happens. No big, right?

“Where’s your stuff?” he asks, sweeping his eyes around the penthouse. The furniture is expensive, he can tell that much, but impersonal. Like somebody had flipped open a page in one of his mom’s catalogues and ordered one of everything.

Angel clears his throat. “There’ve been, uh, fires. Explosions. Apocalypses.” He frowns. “Apocalpsi? I’ve never been sure of the plural, actually.”

“I didn’t know that word _needed_ a plural,” Connor says. They both smile, and the awkwardness vanishes for a moment. Like, exactly one moment. Not even a moment and a half. Just the one.

“I can offer you, uh, pig’s blood,” Angel says. He opens the fridge, closes it again. “Or...goat blood. With a hint of otter. I don’t entertain a lot.”

Connor’s wondering if he should go, make up a homework assignment or a part-time job, when a cheer erupts from the bedroom. It’s rude, but Connor peeks around the door. A hockey game is playing on TV.

“You were watching the Stanley Cup?” he asks.

Angel beams. He looks sort of out of practice at smiling, and now Connor’s glad he came. “You like hockey?” he asks.

“Yeah.” Connor nods, and the tension vanishes now that there’s a bridge they can walk across. He flops down on the living room couch, seizing the remote and flipping on the flatscreen. “Who’s your team?”

***

The second time Connor comes to the penthouse, a slender blonde is rushing out, muttering, “Shit. I’m late. My sister’s going to kill me!”

Angel’s at the door, calling, “Wait, Nina, you forgot your --”

He stops suddenly when he sees Connor in the hallway. “You forgot your notebook,” he finishes, and Connor is exactly 99.99 percent certain that is _not_ what sexy blonde Nina left behind. This time he doesn’t wait for an invitation. He is _so_ coming in.

A bright red lace thong is lying in the middle of the living room floor. And god, Connor wants this life. Not the furniture, or the penthouse necessarily, but the kind of life where hot girls leave sexy panties in the middle of the floor at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. This is probably just Angel’s life, the kind of shit that happens all the time, and awkwardness be damned, Connor will forge a relationship with his birth father if he can tell him how to have that kind of life too.

Except that Angel’s trying to kick the thong under the couch like Connor hasn't already seen it, and the gauzy fabric keeps getting stuck on his shoe, so he finally just decides to stand on it instead.

“You are really bad at this,” Connor says, and Angel looks indignant.

“She wasn’t complaining.” Then Angel blanches and shakes his head. Connor can tell he’s biting back whatever he’d been about to say, shifting into dad mode, which is seven times more awkward because Connor can’t quite manage to say, _yeah, I know you’re my dad._

“So, uh, do you have a girlfriend?” Angel asks finally.

“Maybe. It’s complicated.” Connor flings himself onto the couch, relieved suddenly to discuss this situation with someone who isn’t extremely angry with him.

“That happens.” Angel settles tentatively on the opposite side of the sofa, like Connor might bolt if he gets too close. Which, according to the other life Connor remembers, is a fair reaction. 

“It’s okay.” Connor stares miserably at the ceiling. “You can ask.”

He can practically _hear_ Angel smile. “What happened?”

“Well, we were going to --” _If you’re not old enough to say it, you’re not old enough to do it,_ his high school biology teacher drones in his mind. But Angel will get what he means, right? “Anyway, I tried to sneak into her window at night and the police caught me. Her parents were _not_ amused, and neither were mine. So we’re not allowed to see each other anymore.”

The humiliation is still fresh, and worse for the fact that he's in college. They'd planned a Christmas break rendezvous, fired up after a semester of long-distance longing. Should he have to sneak in his girlfriend's window when they're both 18? No, probably not, but part of him had enjoyed the planning. Figuring out the exact route from the tree to her window. Him buying condoms at 7-11, filling up his shopping basket with seventeen other things he didn’t need just to make the purchase less obvious. Everything would’ve been fine if he hadn’t dropped that stupid overloaded shopping bag on the ground the exact second the police car drove by.

“You didn’t think about just, you know, doing it in the car?” Angel asks.

Connor sighs. “Yeah, if I _had_ a car…”

He follows Angel’s gaze to a row of key hooks on the wall by the door. There have to be at least a dozen. His friend Reggie said after his parents got divorced, his dad turned into Uncle Dad, let him do all kinds of crazy shit that a responsible parent wouldn’t allow. Connor wonders if maybe that’s what you get if your birth father turns out to be a badass creature of the night.

And sure enough, Angel looks at the keys and nods, holding Connor’s gaze just long enough to make his meaning clear.

Then he says, “You have protection, right?”

Connor groans and covers his face with a pillow.

***

Whenever Connor comes over, Angel always makes time, no matter what corporate crisis he’s solving or what creepy-crawly creature of the night he has to kill. If Connor only stays five minutes, Angel doesn’t complain. If he stays for the whole afternoon, they order Chinese. They don’t talk about it, but Connor gets it: the door’s always open, and it’s up to him to decide when -- or if -- to walk through.

So when Angel sneaks through the sewers to find him at a coffee shop in the middle of the day, Connor figures the end is pretty seriously nigh. Weirdly, he feels like he knows exactly what to do. Like if he took the time to sort through all his memories, he might’ve done this apocalypse thing a time or six.

First, he convinces his parents to take his little sister out of town for the weekend. They don’t want to listen at first, but he leans in, reminds them about the car that ran him down and couldn’t kill him, and the ninjas that he’d fought. _You know I’m not like the rest of you_ , he’d said. _Please, listen._

In the end, they’d only gone because he promised he’d be right behind them. The lie makes an awkward lump in his throat as he speeds down the highway toward Wolfram & Hart in one of Angel’s borrowed cars. He’s going because -- well, he doesn’t know exactly. It’s just, if he can help, he should, right? And he doesn’t want his father to die. Not after he just got him back.

Honestly, defeating a.well-dressed and extremely strong lawyer-assassin-demon thing is not even the weirdest thing he and Angel have done together. Afterward, they nod at each other, which doesn’t seem like quite enough. Connor thinks they’re about to do the man-hug thing where they clap each other on the back, but Angel pulls him into a real hug, strong and warm and good.

When he lets go and steps back, he gives Connor a real dad kind of look, the kind that says _I love you more than I can say_ and also _don’t even think about crossing me._

“This isn’t your fight,” Angel says. “Go home.”

Connor means to do that. He really does. He speeds down the highway toward his family, swallowing back the wrongness of leaving a father behind, until he rounds a corner and the ocean appears. He slams on the brakes and spins the car around.

There’s a way he can help.

Faith.

The memories of his old life are like fragmented pieces of an old nightmare. Honestly, he doesn’t look at them too closely because he doesn’t think there’s a therapist in the whole USA who could cure _that_ kind of PTSD. But he’s been here before, he knows it, this exact spot.

He dropped Angel into the ocean here once. Jesus, that was fucked up. _Don’t dwell_ , he tells himself. Fast forward.

Faith, the Vampire Slayer. He’d come here with her after a mission. She’d looked out across the ocean, then pointed at the ramshackle apartments up on the bluff.

“I ever get a chance to retire, that’s where I’m living.”

“Those are shacks,” he’d protested. He was still new to this world, but he knew there were better places for the taking.

“I could fix them up.” Faith flexed her bicep at him. “See these? Solid muscle. Sledgehammer, drill, a little TLC…” She smiled. “I might’ve watched a little too much HGTV in prison. Our little secret, don’t tell.”

The old version of Connor had no idea what HGTV was. The new version of him laughs, suddenly understanding the joke. An older part of him, a part that knows something about power and how to spot it, tingles. He looks up at the top of the bluff, and a light clicks on in one of the ramshackle old buildings. Faith.

***

The outside of the building still looks like a crack den, but when Fatih opens the door, the inside looks like it was decorated by someone who’d watched, well, a lot of HGTV. His brain -- the new part, the one that lived a perfectly normal life -- coughs up words like _accent walls_ and _ottoman._ And shit, why is he thinking about that now? He should be worried about whether Faith will even remember him. Whatever memory mojo that sorcerer did, did it work on Slayers?

"Do you remember me?" he blurts.

She smiles, then frowns just as fast. “Connor? Why would i forget?”

He doesn’t waste time with pleasantries. “My dad’s in trouble.”  
Faith reaches for something on the wall and comes up with a crossbow. “Alright,” she says, “Lead the way.”

Even through his worry, Connor can’t help but appreciate the sleek and sensuous way her hips move, but he shuts the door on that thought quickly. “That’s not enough,” he says. “We need backup.”

He can’t explain how he knows that, just some old part of him prickling with the knowledge that the world is ending and his dad is about to die. Faith looks at him searchingly, then opens the door and shouts up the stairs. “Girls! Grab your favorite pointy thing and come downstairs!”

Feet thunder toward them, not just from Faith’s house but from all the tattered structures lined up on the bluff. Suddenly dozens of girls are converging on Faith’s front porch, all improbably young but fearless and well-armed.

“Got a whole army of slayers,” Faith says, looking satisfied. She steps forward, puts a hand on Connor’s shoulder. “Now tell me where Angel is, and get out of here.”

Connor knows he should go. Faith will save Angel, and now it’s time to fulfill his promise to his other father. The one who raised him. The one who’s been there his whole life.

But he’s already shaking his head, refusing to move. Something in him -- maybe the part that came from Angel -- can’t leave a job like this for someone else to do.

“I’m coming,” he says, and Faith doesn’t argue.

***

In the end, Connor slays the dragon.

What would make Angel -- a being who can be killed by almost nothing _except_ fire -- take on a fire-breathing creature?

“Swear to me you’re not _trying_ to die,” Connor says when the fight is over. He thinks that it’s the same line his other father used on him, the night with the party in the field and the alcohol poisoning.

“I’m okay,” Angel croaks. He’s badly singed and probably can’t walk but he’s alive. Or undead. Or whatever vampires are. “Now go tell your family…” He trails off into a fit of coughing. “That you’re okay.”

“You _are_ my family,” Connor says, refusing to move, even though he’s kneeling in a puddle of purple goo and demon parts.

“Your dad must be worried sick.” This Angel manages without a cough, although his voice is thready, just this side of a wheeze. His eyes lock on Connor’s. “ _I_ was worried sick.”

“Yeah, well, how do you think I felt about you?” Connor shoots back.

Faith sidles up, perches an elbow on Connor’s shoulder. A thousand inappropriate thoughts shoot through his mind, nevermind that she’s covered in just as much goo and demon parts as everyone else.

She pokes Angel gently with a toe. “Hate to say it, big guy, but I’m on the kid’s side. A whole _army_ of slayers, and you took on the biggest evil in the whole world without even _asking_ for help? You gotta convince us both this wasn’t the world’s most elaborate suicide plan.”

Angel looks back and forth between them. There’s a lot of undignified coughing and wheezing. Finally, he says, “What should I keep for you in the new lair?”

“Cheez-its,” Connor says. “I like cheez-its.”

“I can respect that.” Faith bumps him with her hip, and Connor prays to whatever god might exist to help him control inappropriate physical reactions.

“Here,” Angel says, “these are ours.”

He passes Connor something covered in purple goo, and the familiar tired grin lights up his face -- well, the half of it that moves, anyway. “See?” he says, when Connor realizes what they are. “I saved us the keys to the best car in the motorpool.” 

Connor doesn’t miss the emphasis on the word _us_. 

Maybe he betrayed his real parents by risking his life like this, but then, there’s no such thing as real parents, is there? There are birth parents, adoptive parents, step parents, teachers and uncles and grandmas who fill in for parents. It’s all awkward and messy, but the love is real. There’s no limit on how many people can love you, and how many people you love back. Connor intends to fight for them all.


End file.
